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Post by ROAM on Mar 10, 2013 19:13:40 GMT -8
Hello, hello there! I'm hoping this is in the right section of the forum... ^^; Well, the general gist is that I was having a chat over Skype with Poet and we started to wonder what the history of roleplaying is like. We briefly discussed several topics including:- What was the first ever roleplaying site?
- Who's idea was it all?
- Who designed the affiliation and advertising system?
- What was the first resource site?
- When there were like, no skins and codes around, who figured all that stuff out, basically on their own?
But then we quickly realized... neither of us knew anything. XD; Some of you RPers have been around for quite awhile and seen quite a lot, so we decided to post a thread here. Does anyone know anything about any of this?
Sorry if this is a lame topic. >_<'''
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Post by konya on Mar 10, 2013 19:18:15 GMT -8
tbh... some of these questions are simply unanswerable. you'll probably find that there are a lot of sites from back in the 1980's that would claim to be the first, but for all we know there could be others that are now lost to the history of the web.
who's idea was it all? people have been sharing stories and working on them since pre-history. might as well ask whose idea it was to laugh at farts.
afaik the affiliate/advertising system is just like most others on the internet, might have its roots in the old affiate-ring dealy-o's, might just as likely have been adapted from real-world practices.
there have been so many resource sites it'd be the same answer as the 'first site' one.
there have always been skins. there have also almost always been codes to modify board appearance. it's only how people have used those resources that has grown. i remember before anyone really used CSS - i'd say that would be the start of what people call 'skinning' today. and back then, just like now, it's kind of a thing people work out on their own.
but imean even then? the first time i used css on sidebars was because i hated making images. i used the css knowledge i gained four years earlier making neopets layouts.
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Post by katya on Mar 10, 2013 21:12:24 GMT -8
The earliest rp "sites" I've been a part of where done through mailing lists, so I'd say as far as internet rping goes, I can't imagine it being very feasible until at least yahoo groups (and other free mailing list services) got started. Otherwise, there's no real way to have a group rp. Granted, I know plenty of people rping on AIM or email one-on-one, but that imo doesn't count as even a proto-site. But as soon as there was forum technology, I'm sure there was rping on forums, although I think email and AIM remained most popular until that first generation of neopets rpers started migrating away from neopets and onto forums. If you want to do some ancient history, look up Dave Arneson. You can't really give one guy credit with the idea, but if you were to do that, Dave Arneson's the guy that changed up war strategy games into role-playing games. Meaning he said hey, let's not have one player control an army, let's have them control one guy! Wouldn't that be fun? Before that, there's still the reenactment folk that have "RPed" for forever and a day. And yeah, offline I know Gen Con started up in the 60's, so I'd say rping started becoming a semi-popular hobby sometime around then. While that basically means tabletop rp rather than writing rp, I think it counts if we're looking at the history of the thing. Besides, if we're talking about story-telling rp, that's probably been around since the dawn of time. Seiryuu.org is possibly the oldest surviving roleplay resource site? I don't know, but I know it's existed since the mid-nineties. It was really more of a host site for games to upload their rp logs back then though (recall that they're primarily written through email, so obviously it's kinda hard to read them if you're not one of the rpers in the thread), not a place to provide stuff. Otherwise, I recall a few sites that had a lot of rping advice, like this site (warning for comic sans). I don't think we ever really needed an rp resource site in the contemporary fashion until rping started requiring templates and face-claims, honestly.
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Post by konya on Mar 10, 2013 21:17:09 GMT -8
I don't think we ever really needed an rp resource site in the contemporary fashion until rping started requiring templates and face-claims, honestly. I was on at least three long before face claims started appearing on proboards so I'd say nope. They used to be geared more towards info topics, site help, community and advertising.
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Post by konya on Mar 10, 2013 21:26:42 GMT -8
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the greatest general under the heavens
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Post by Egao, Egao Everywhere on Mar 11, 2013 0:50:25 GMT -8
I was considering working on this as a research paper during my summer but I realized all my sources will be from the Internet and no academic professors is ever going to accept it as real.
Also lol superhero syndrome. First time I hear that.
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Post by the guru on Mar 12, 2013 12:37:35 GMT -8
Back in my day, roleplaying was what we did to keep our spouses from getting bored.
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Post by darth vader on Mar 12, 2013 13:08:13 GMT -8
little known fact: i got drunk with screamin' jay hawkins and invented roleplay in 1967
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Post by pascaline on Mar 12, 2013 18:27:51 GMT -8
It's kinda hard to say who the exact FIRST site was as far as play-by-post role playing on the internet. I remember before sites there were chat and mail groups that you signed up with via chat rooms and AOL used to have a lot of chat rooms dedicated to role playing. Then using forums blew up when Brave Net - not around any more - offered free forum hosting. Free site hosting eventually became available on Yahoo, Homestead, Geocities, etc. and people began to make sites for their RPGs and forums to go with it.
Boards2go used to be the most popular, but then ezboards came along and became the most popular. Invisionfree came into play and eventually ezboards got shut down due to money issues. However, WAY back in the 90s and early 2000s, sites with self-hosted forums were preferred in general and were around more often than free-hosted sites.
As far as RP resources go, I'm not quite sure what the first RPG-specific resource site was but most rpgs relied on resources from anime/manga resource sites. However, back in the day and especially on self-hosted sites, resources were provided on the site. A lot of boards2go RPGs still provide resources on-site, making things custom for the players who ask in the 'site studio'.
Affiliating was started with the true idea of sites being sisters, sites that were related to each other or where characters and plots can merge together. For networking the anime/manga community had the Anime RPG Network, where RPs could even get site-hosting or just affiliating. Web rings were the most preferred way to advertise though.
Advertising on sites goes back to the boards2go community. A lot of stuff for RPing as we know it was created on Boards2Go communities, including the idea of a post template for characters, because back then you could code html on Boards2go and Invisionfree and other board hosts did not have the ability to produce the coding that we can do now.
Skins for proboards and invisionfree were provided by mods/workers of those companies. The first resource site for proboards created by someone not a mod or employee for the company was actually a European-based site (German, I think) whose name I can't remember, but they figured shit out fast.
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